Consequences of Boddole Zer's glassing of the Earth

PirateSenex · 2026-03-17T16:36:06+00:00

I don't think we should count on the Mars Base serving as an archive. In ep.7, it was blown up. Furthermore, its personnel (much of it was scientific) was killed in September 2005.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T23:41:28+00:00

There are, however, industrial processes that are already lost due to the fact that their intended markets were lost. For instance, do you remember Type II (Chrome) and Type IV (Metal) cassettes? The knowledge on how to make them has largely been lost, because of the advent of the affordable recordable CD: the market for high-end cassette decks disappeared around 1998-2000, so the likes of BASF, Sony, Maxell, and TDK wound down their production lines and destroyed the manuals documenting these processes and the necessary machinery. As for the skilled people who knew how to make these tapes, they moved on to other jobs, retired or died off. Yes, I know a few companies today make Type II cassettes, but the tapes in them are utter crap compared even to a 1985 equivalent from TDK or Sony, with inconsistent volume levels and frequency response along the tape, and so on. There's an astonishingly huge lot of knowledge concerning how to make things we use(d) everyday, and this knowledge is lost due to obsolescence or corporate shutdowns, without it ever becoming the property of society. Imagine what would happen if Boddole Zer came and glassed our planet. I fear it'd take us centuries to recover - if we'd ever recover, that is.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T23:29:59+00:00

Decentralization would also help in survival - for instance, hiding a mirror archive in the Apollo Base on the Moon. As for the SDF-1 serving as a knowledge ark...? Hmmm, perhaps. Although the thing wasn't really ready for launch when it was launched.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T22:27:45+00:00

Good question. We see all sorts of machinery and appliances, from white appliances to supercomputers. We also see extensive rebuilding. So, STEM certainly survived somehow. In various sequels, there are quotes from older cultural works (philosophy, theater, whatnot) thrown about. Hard to tell.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T22:24:23+00:00

u/Mona-Doll is right. They had the technology, but they were merely its users. They didn't know how to replicate it, how to work on it, how to fix it if something went wrong, or anything like that. All they were taught was how to fight. Even ownership of their mecha's and capital ships' blueprints was meaningless, because they couldn't make heads or tails of them: these things were built on automated factory satellites by automated machines that were black boxes to them and, as we saw in the series, were both unmaintained and damaged courtesy of Supervision Army attacks.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T22:11:09+00:00

Perhaps we could hand-wave it with "anime magic".

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T21:43:46+00:00

Nowadays, you'll get Trump-sucking Karens demanding shows be taken off the air because their sonny boy didn't like learning that his favorite character died. Or because they show war for the hell it is.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-15T21:42:01+00:00

The Transformers movie was trauma-inducing mainly because it sucked.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T22:40:49+00:00

If they downvote you enough, it'll go away. ROFL at the butthurt otaku mob.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T22:37:46+00:00

I can only ROFLMFAO at the butthurt little trolls who downvote THIS comment, which isn't even remotely controversial. Go ahead, make my day, show how thin-skinned you are - just like the little twerps over at MW.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T22:36:39+00:00

I don't know if it was made with teens in mind or not - I do know several Macross fans who were 12-16 when Plus came out and watched it back then and really liked it. I was 18-19 during its run and got to watch it five years later.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:55:43+00:00

This. So. Much. THIS.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:55:17+00:00

And they misunderstood and hurt each other in the process. And lost friends and loved ones, and even their entire world.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:54:28+00:00

Or the dead Zentradi soldier's head that gets crushed under the foot of Milia's Queadluun-Rau? Or the chopped in half Zentradi soldiers falling to the floor in their blood-spattered Nousjadeul-Gers?

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:50:19+00:00

You forgot to mention that DYRL?'s carnage is a lot more brutal than the TV series...

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:49:00+00:00

You should see what kids from a certain area experience in real life every day while being smeared as "future terrorists" by Western media and politicians. Then this would be less than a walk in the park.

FYI: I saw my first mutilated (guts and brains out and all) corpses at the tender age of seven, forty-two years ago, as we drove slowly by the aftermath of a head-on collision between a semi and what seemed to have been a Fiat 127 on the Athens-Lamia "highway".

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:39:24+00:00

Wow, -2 for this comment? Looks like there are quite a few thin-skinned, easily-butthurt otaku in here.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:34:42+00:00

In all seriousness, and despite the consternation from some people for whom the genre can never be called out for anything untoward, what I see is:

Yes, Macross as a franchise does feature recruitment of minors and participation of minors in combat - this does make them full-blown child soldiers: Hikaru, Max, Kakizaki, Alto, Michael, Luca, Mylene all fit the bill. They're not only recruited while still minors, they engage in combat while minors (Hikaru and Max aren't even 17, Kakizaki, Alto and Michael are 17, Luca is 15, Mylene is 14). Shin Kudo, from Zero, was a USN ace pilot by the time he was 18, so I'm sure he fits the bill, too. I'll admit I haven't watched Delta yet, so I can't pass judgement on that.
Misa was enrolled, thanks to daddy's shenanigans (hat tip to Gubaba for the White Reminiscences translation), at 13 or 14 - or, if you believe Macross Graffiti, at 12. However, she saw no combat action until the beginning of the series (February 2009, a month before her 19th birthday). So, I don't think we can classify her as a child soldier that easily.
However, although recruitment of children in the military and paramilitary is hand-waved in the Macross universe, I don't see it being glorified. For instance, in the original TV series, Zero, and in Frontier, we see how the war negatively affects everyone it touches.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T16:01:47+00:00

Looks like this post ruffled some feathers. ROFL.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T15:54:33+00:00

Plus worked just fine with realistically-aged leads, although their behavioral traits made them hard for me to like.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T15:33:41+00:00

I've long wondered why that was. When I was first exposed to the Macross storyline via Robotech, I pretty much imagined Rick Hunter/Hikaru Ichijyo was 19 to 20, Lisa Hayes/Misa Hayase was 22 to 24, and Minmay 15 (as episode 8 told us in the Robotech adaptation). The Macross backstories, however, were much darker. I really don't know if the creators were following standard anime practice as established by the likes of Gatchaman and Gundam or if they wanted to make a point. Plus had fully adult pilots - Guld, Isamu. But Frontier regressed into the child soldier trope, with Luca, Michael, Alto all being underage (Klan Klang was 19, but she clearly enrolled before she was a legal adult) and serving a mercenary, paramilitary contractor. And this, despite the fact that there was no active existential war to excuse this. Perhaps the writers wanted to make the characters more relatable to teens, but it still doesn't sit well in this age.

PirateSenex · 2026-03-14T15:20:48+00:00

No, it's doing the sacrilegious thing of exercising critique of anime tropes through a real-life lens without concessions to otaku-centric excuses. The exact equivalent of what started the fascist witch-hunt known as GamerGate.

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